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The Sages in the Attic

The sound of giggling is loud, up in the attic. Today my daughter and her best friend have decided they are a band – Family Freeze Dance, they call themselves – and they are using an old cassette player to record their frenetic, squealing, strumming, yelling, talking “music.” A peek behind the door reveals a vision of summertime seven-year-olds: covered in bug bites and dirt, missing teeth, routinely distracted by fart jokes.

But there is another kind of magic happening up there too, one that we sometimes forget on our way to adulthood: Delight in communion. Resonant joy. No one is managing the other’s experience, worrying over how they are, or trying to help.

I’m thinking about this as I remember a conversation with a client on what it means to be responsible. Many of us, many of us women in particular, have grown up with the sense that we need to track and manage the well being of everyone in our orbit. To take on what they’re feeling. To make it okay. Those expectations come early, with an insidious subtlety.

But follow that a little further, and we can end up coming to all kinds of bizzare-o conclusions: That things will fall apart without our help, that we need to catch anyone around us who falls. That if we aren’t care-taking, we’ll be left.

Our good intentions unwittingly say something else. Because if everyone needs helping, no one’s quite right as they are.Of course, we do need each other. Lots and lots. But if you’ll allow me a little semantic latitude, taking care of each other is different from care-taking each other.We want the people we care for to feel better, but we cannot do the feeling for them. We aren’t responsible for that (or entitled to it).

Back in the days when I was too sick to do much, I saw a lot of practitioners I wanted to lift me out of the pool of my own suffering. But the ones who did the most never bought into the story that I needed fixing; they let me hold my own power close, they trusted something deep and potent within me.

Here is what those kids upstairs with their very, very loud “music” show us: We are here to remind each other of who we already are. To return to the creative, unhindered, healthy selves that have always been here. We may facilitate that process for each other, but in important ways, we don’t do anything except show up. Which is everything.

Quick note: There’s still time to join the Embodied Writing workshop on Saturday, September 30th. We’d love to see you there!